This post was published 10 months 4 days ago which may make it out of date. This does not mean the information is wrong, or useless - it is a warning just in case!

Bonus Post – Please note that today’s real post will be after this one. Sorry they are being posted rather late in the evening – didn’t get home until recently from the hospital.

This is just a quick and simple guide on using Auctioneer to scan the auction house, explaining…

• What the term ‘Scan the Auction House’ even means
• Why you would want to scan
• How often you should do it
• How you actually go about doing it

If you already feel like you know all of this, or don’t need quite so much in depth information feel free to skip to the end of this post and just watch the video.
For the rest of us, let’s get started.

Scan the Auction House, what’s that?

A whole bunch of addons are able to pull all the data from the auction house and store them in a database.

This database contains information on every single item seen in the AH, including how many have been seen, who’s selling them, how much they sell for* and a whole host of other things depending on the addon – we’ll be using Auctioneer which you can download from their official site here, from Curse Gaming here or from WoWInterface here. If you don’t know which to pick, just use the official link!

By ‘scanning’ the auction house Auctioneer gets all the information on the items currently in the Auction House at that moment in time. The last part is important – it can only collect data from items in the AH when you actually scan it. As such you should scan regularly, preferably at least once every single day, so that your data is up to date.

*Auctioneer is probably the most detailed in it’s information, all together allowing you to see a tone of different information on the data, from the average price over the past 3 days to the standard deviation in price, complete histograms on items and so on. This is in some part Auctioneers curse – it is TOO good. It floods the average user with so much information that they probably don’t fully understand, let alone care about.

Why would I want to spend time Scanning the Auction House?

Nothing is worse than buying a whole bunch of items that looked like a bargin, and then finding out your data was innacurrate and you just paid 800% the normal price!

As such you should try to have scan data that you have been collecting for at least a week, if not longer, before you start really buying or selling on the auction house. The longer your data collection is, the more accurate it will be.

If you use the GetAll scan (described below and in the video) it is also pretty quick, taking only a couple of minutes on most computers.
A great way to remember to scan is to do it as soon as you login, before you start doing anything else.

How often should I scan? Does the data get tainted if I scan too often?

Aucitoneer is able to detect duplicate auctions from different scans – as such there is no possible way to scan too often and mess up your data. You can scan as often as you like without worrying!

However, Blizzard has put in place a limitation on what addons can do, and so Auctioneer can only do a GetAll scan once every 15 minutes. Truth be told you are probably wasting your time if you are scanning every 15 minutes, but it can be helpful if you are doing a scan before doing a Search (like we did in today’s real post on Using Auctioneer to Buy BoE’s to DE)

If you really do need to scan more often than that, you can do the standard scan. This however can take a very long time, depending on how many items are in the auction house at the time. Even on a fairly medium population server it can take 10, 20 or even 30 minutes or more. Worse it stops you from doing anything on that character other than chatting really. As such, I wouldn’t recommend doing a standard search unless your internet connection or computer can’t handle doing a GetAll scan (detailed bellow)

So how do I actually go about scanning?

Okay, so now we know what scanning is, why we should do it and how often – now how do we actually go about doing it?

With Auctioneer it is surprisingly simple to scan the auction house. This is a lot easier to see in game than to describe, so refer to the video below! It has a rather basic recap of the above too, so you can just refer to the video from now on, unless you need the in depth information listed in this post.

There you go, it’s as simple as that!